Donaghue carefully walks the tightrope between comedy and tragedy, making Rosa a convincing blend of compassion and fatigue, honest humanity and bureaucratic double-speak. Michael’s father died a few years earlier of an overdose, and his mother is in prison for possession, making Noah the last relative available to look after him. The main narrative gets off to a shaky start when Noah is contacted by Rosa Figueroa, a social worker exploring the “kinship resources” for Noah’s 11-year-old great-nephew, Michael. What exactly did Noah do to his wife when reaching for her? Was it tied up in coffee drinking, like his smoking habit? Did he reach for her seven or eight times a day? My questions became absurd, but this all points to a broader problem: like a previously non-smoking scientist suddenly reaching for a fag packet, something about Donoghue’s story doesn’t feel quite real. This is typical of Akin: the words roll off the page, the image is tender and sad, conjuring not only the awfulness of that grasp on emptiness, but its repetition too. Early on in Akin, Emma Donoghue’s 12th novel, we are told that her 79-year-old protagonist Noah took up smoking after the death of his wife because “he’d just needed something else to do with his hands when they reached for her and closed on nothing”.
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